It occured to me that it would be really useful for novice and rookie users (like myself!) to have a searchable website of catagorised snippets of simple code and information that people can input as they learn along the way. Such as:

Code:

while (nMotorRunState != RunSateIdle){}

Is a great way of waiting for (doing nothing until) a motor to reach its target.

And:

"nMotorEncoderTarget can only be written to, it cannot be read from"

Both of these would be obvious to a more advanced user but to a beginner things like:

Code:

while (nMotorEncoder != nMotorEncoderTarget){ //do something here}

'Should' work. Maybe thats a bad example but you get the drift!

I think it would be a great help - I'd love some feedback on the idea.

Maybe you're thinking that that's the point of the forum anyway but I think generally people ask questions and get specific answers. What if you worked out a simple problem in your code, would you post it?

Well, there it is! Lay it on me!

Oli

Fri Mar 14, 2008 11:09 am

vnguyen

Site Admin

Joined: Wed Jan 24, 2007 10:44 amPosts: 442Location: Pittsburgh, PA

Hey Oli, that seems like a neat idea. Do you want more of a "neat code tips that may be useful" area or more like a searchable help documentation that if you typed in something like "nMotorPID" it would give you a list of documentation that contains "nMotorPID" in it? If it's the latter, we do have that in our latest builds which is going to improve the Help functionality greatly.

If it's the first, maybe I can create a special forum for it?

Let's see if anyone else has any input on it.

_________________Vu NguyenSoftware Training Development Team | WebmasterNeed more support? Email ROBOTC Support at support@robotc.net to put in a support ticket

I can definitely see a searchable help being put to good use. Though I think the the help as it is is pretty good; well catagorised and contains thorough explanations of what each 'function' does.

What I think might be missing is, as you say, 'neat code tips':

Its not always clear what the simplest way of using the code is - or how to just get to a specific goal (like the encoder target example in my previous post) as there are often many many routes (some of which wont work).

I think the help could do with a few more examples of use (but I would imagine these being 'code' instead of 'goal' focused).

The most fruitful method would probably come from novice users' learnings - little things that can keep you debugging for days!

To summarize - yes! a forum as you describe is the basis of my proposal.

Hope that made sense, I look forward to getting some feedback!

Oli

Sat Mar 15, 2008 4:33 pm

Ford Prefect

Guru

Joined: Sat Mar 01, 2008 12:52 pmPosts: 1030

great idea!
That's even the point that's missing in RobotC help:
code snippets!
to EVERY topic!
with hyper links to RELATED code snippets and topics!

(BTW: I mayself made the same mistake with nmotorencoder - and never understood why it didn't work! ! )

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